Aravind Adiga, a 33-year-old first-time novelist from India, is the surprise winner of this year's Man Booker £50,000 ($87,000) prize for fiction for his "perfect" book The White Tiger.

He is the second-youngest winner, only the third debutante to win in the 40-year history of the prize and also the fourth Indian-born writer to be acclaimed, joining compatriots Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai.

The novel, published by Atlantic Books, is an account of the son of a rickshaw driver who determines to escape a life of poverty by passing from the darkness of village life to the light of entrepreneurial success.

Michael Portillo, chairman of the judges, praised the novel for its depiction of the dark side of Indian society.

"It undertakes the extra-ordinarily difficult technique of gaining and holding our sympathy for a hero who is a thoroughgoing villain. It tackles [its themes] with tremendous humour and is extremely readable. The novel is in many ways perfect, in the way it maintains its tone and is true to itself."

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Mr Adiga was born in Madras, raised partly in Australia and studied at Columbia and Oxford universities. He is a former correspondent for Time magazine in India and has also written articles for the Financial Times. He has described the novel as "the story of a man's quest for freedom, and of the terrible cost of that freedom.

"The novel attempts to give literary voice to those who are being written out of the narratives of our time - the poor."

Mr Portillo said the judges chose the book following an "emotionally draining" debate lasting just over two hours. "My own criterion was - does this book knock my socks off? And this one did," he said.

"In the end The White Tiger prevailed because the judges felt that it shocked and entertained in equal measure."

He also praised the book for "dealing with some very important social issues, the divisions between rich and poor, and the impossibility of the poor escaping their lot - and this in a country that is becoming more and more important in global affairs".

The youngest novelist to win the Man Booker prize was Ben Okri, who won in 1991 at the age of 32 for The Famished Road.

The only two previous first-time novelists to have won were Arundhati Roy in 1997 for The God of Small Things and DBC Pierre in 2003 for Vernon God Little.

This year's Man Booker shortlist was considered controversial for its omission of Salman Rushdie for his well-received The Enchantress of Florence.